Google Unveils Wear OS 4, Featuring Gmail and Calendar Apps

Google's smartwatch operating system will finally feature Google apps for Google's mail and calendar services. Wear OS 4, unveiled Wednesday at Google I/O, will fill in that weird absence(Opens in a new window) and add a new Watch Face Format designed for easy customization by developers and users.

Google’s post announcing this update(Opens in a new window) to its wearables platform touts a “later this year” release for Wear OS 4 and its Gmail and Calendar apps. This release will also bring tighter integration with its Nest connected devices in an updated Home app that will let you check who rang a Nest doorbell and unlock your door remotely. Google touts similar advances in on-watch app utility coming from WhatsApp, Spotify, and Peloton.

Google tips “a faster and more reliable text-to-speech experience” with Wear OS 4, as well as backup and restore tools to move data and settings between watches, and automatic carrying over of app permissions from a phone to a watch if you set up your watch from your phone.

The change that users may notice first, however, is the new watch face designs and features opened up by the Watch Face Format Google developed with Samsung. Google’s post announcing it describes it as “a declarative XML format” that requires no executable code from a developer and gets automatic maintenance updates through Wear OS 4.

Google says Watch Face Format will allow styles that include analog or digital faces and complications that embed data from other apps, plus the ability to customize your own watch face using tools built into Wear OS instead of having to install an extra app for that job. But the current release of Watch OS already offers comparable features.

Google’s smartwatch efforts have gone around and around since it introduced Android Wear in 2014 and saw the first models fall short of the first-gen Apple Watch unveiled months later. Sluggish software updates and slow, old Qualcomm chipsets further sandbagged the platform that Google renamed Wear OS in 2018.

In 2021, Google rebooted its wearables vision by throwing in with Samsung and adopting that Korean tech giant’s chipsets and combining its code base with Samsung’s Tizen. The results since have featured such significantly improved devices as Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 and Google’s Pixel Watch. But while Google now boasts that Wear OS is the fastest-growing smartwatch platform, the smartwatch market continues to consist of “Apple and everybody else." In February, Counterpoint Research reported(Opens in a new window) that Apple accounted for 30% of smartwatch shipments worldwide in 2022, followed by Samsung at 10.1%.

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